Michael Middleton Dwyer

Michael Middleton Dwyer
Michael Dwyer is an American architect known for designing new buildings in traditional vocabularies. He was the editor of Great Houses of the Hudson River (2001) and the author of Carolands (2006).
Architectural practice
1981–1996
Michael Dwyer was associated from 1981 to 1996 with the architecture firm Buttrick White & Burtis, where he worked on several notable projects, among them the Saint Thomas Choir School, a fifteen-story boarding school in Midtown Manhattan, and the Dana Discovery Center, a venue for environmental education, designed to be the centerpiece of the Central Park Conservancy's 1990–1993 restoration of Central Park's Harlem Meer, a man-made lake in the park's northeast corner. In an 1993 interview with the magazine Progressive Architecture, Dwyer noted that the building's "picturesque character" was intended to reinforce the park's "romantic landscape design."
While at Buttrick White & Burtis, Dwyer was an advocate for New York's prewar, classical style of architecture. In a 1995 survey by The New York Times of the nascent classical revival, reporter Patricia Leigh Brown noted that, "Michael Dwyer...an architect at Buttrick White & Burtis...has recently completed a classical-style yacht" and a "town house on the Upper East Side," a house whose new facade architect Robert Stern characterized as "...scholarly...reflecting the elegant manner of Ange-Jacques Gabriel."
1996–present
After establishing his own firm in 1996, Dwyer was the architect for the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York's Riverside Park, supplementing Penelope Jencks' statue of Roosevelt with granite medallions, set in the surrounding bluestone paving (one inscribed with a quotation from a 1958 speech of Roosevelt's; the other with a quotation from Adlai Stevenson's 1962 eulogy for her). In 1997, he restored the exterior of the Francis F. Palmer House at 75 East 93rd Street, a designated New York City landmark, and from 1998 to 2007, acted as consulting architect to the Cosmopolitan Club, a private social club for women.
In addition to institutional projects, Dwyer designed residential projects for New York's private sector, including apartments on Manhattan's east side (960 Fifth Avenue and 720 Park Avenue); its west side (The Dakota and The San Remo); and houses in diverse locations such as East Hampton, Greenwich, and Nantucket.
The financier and preservationist Dick Jenrette, who called Dwyer his "favorite young neoclassical architect," commissioned him to build a pair of classical pavilions at Edgewater, Jenrette's Hudson River Valley villa. Jenrette described the pavilions in his memoir, Adventures with Old Houses:
In recent years, I've begun making more of my own architectural imprint on the Edgewater property. This past year I added a small neo-classical guest house, built on a point of land across the lagoon to the north of Edgewater—far enough away not to compete with the main house. Designed by Michael Dwyer of New York, the guest house is a small Grecian temple with four columns of the Doric order framing a large porch looking downriver. Viewed from the front porch of Edgewater across the lagoon, the new structure serves as an architectural folly extending the sweep of the landscape to the north.
Michael Dwyer also relocated the swimming pool and added a charming pool house, again in classical style with four Doric columns along the side of the pool. The effect is quite Roman—rather like a small corner of Hadrian's Villa. From guest house to pool house and back to the main house provides a scenic one-mile roundabout walk, mostly along the winding riverbank.
The July 2018 issue of Architectural Digest featured Hollyhock, Dwyer's largest project, a new house in Southampton, New York for real estate executive Mary Ann Tighe, a collaboration with interior designer Bunny Williams, reminiscent of the prewar houses of architect David Adler and interior designer Frances Elkins.
List of representative projects
35 Meter Cruising Yacht (interior architecture; completed 1994).
Nureyev Apartment; The Dakota, New York City (interior architecture; completed 1995).
Eleanor Roosevelt Monument, Riverside Park, New York City (granite medallions and bronze plaques; completed 1996).
Windsong; Shimmo Beach, Nantucket, MA (new house; completed 1996).
Francis F. Palmer House, 75 E 93rd St, New York City (roof replacement and window restoration; completed 1997).
Garden Pavilion and Pool House at Edgewater, in Barrytown, New York (completed 1997).
Maisonette duplex, 960 Fifth Avenue, New York City (interior architecture; completed 1999).
Longview; 27 Gin Lane, Southampton, NY (new garden facade, new wing with indoor pool, and interior architecture; completed 2000).
Mead Point; at Indian Field Road, Greenwich, CT (new house; completed 2001).
Stone Cottage; at Toylsome Place, Southampton, NY (new house and interior architecture; completed 2004).
720 Park Avenue, New York City (apartment alterations; completed 2006).
Cosmopolitan Club, New York City (alterations to the entrance hall, ballroom, and garden penthouse, from 1998 to 2007).
New Sommariva; East Hampton, NY (new house; completed 2009).
Hollyhock; at Southampton, NY (new residence, guest house, garden pavilion, and arbor; completed 2017).
Triplex penthouse; The San Remo, New York City (alterations completed 2017).
Gallery
Bibliography
Carl A. Pearson (author); Michael Dwyer (illustrator). "Up in Central Park on the Shore of Harlem Meer," Architectural Record (March 1990).
Mark Alden Branch (author); Michael Dwyer (illustrator). "Flirting with Folly in Central Park," Progressive Architecture (August 1991): 23.
Michael Dwyer (contributing illustrator). "A View of the Dana Discovery Center, Central Park, New York," Architecture in Perspective No. 8 (American Society of Architectural Illustrators, 1994): 10.
Michael Dwyer. "Buildings in Public Parks," Clem Labine's Traditional Building (March/April 1995): 26, 28, 30;
Michael Dwyer. "Building with Stone," Clem Labine's Traditional Building (March/April 1996): 25–26; .
Michael Dwyer. "The Arts and Crafts in Architecture Today," Classicist No. 3 (1996–97): 90–96; .
Michael Dwyer (editor) with preface by Mark Rockefeller. Great Houses of the Hudson River (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, in association with Historic Hudson Valley, 2001).
Michael Dwyer (author) with a foreword by Mario Buatta. Carolands (Redwood City, CA: San Mateo County Historical Association, 2006).
See also
Buttrick White & Burtis
Francis F. Palmer House (75 East 93rd Street, New York City)
George F. Baker Jr. House (69 East 93rd Street, New York City)
Edgewater (Barrytown, New York)
Dick Jenrette
References
External links
Website of Michael Dwyer Architect
Michael Dwyer on Pinterest
Michael Dwyer on Instagram
Institute of Traditional Architecture 2015 Rankings.
Living people
20th-century American architects
21st-century American architects
21st-century American non-fiction writers
Writers from Manhattan
New Classical architects
Preservationist architects
American neoclassical architects
American architectural historians
Architects from New York City
Architecture firms based in New York City
Historians from New York (state)
Neoclassical architecture in New York (state)
Central Park
Columbia College (New York) alumni
University of Pennsylvania School of Design alumni
1954 births